Why (or Why Not) the WYSI-WordPress Plugin

WYSI-Wordpress is a WordPress plugin that replaces the built-in rich text editor. It’s based on TinyMCE.

After picking WordPress to be the primary content management system for my site (yea, it’s not a real CMS but it was simple and has what I want for now) I wanted to move some entries I had in blogger. There were only a few and when the import failed (no surprise as I’m using the blogger beta) I decide to go the same route used to get them into blogger, cut and paste.

The built in editor was bizzare. I pasted in the text and went to save. I was warned that I would lose my changes because I was navigating away from the page. Sure enough, when it refreshed the title was there (that I type) but everything I pasted was gone. I tried various workarounds such as pasting html code into the HTML window and had the same result. This happened in both Firefox 2 (Mac and Windows) and Safari on the Mac.

So it was off to quickly find a plug-in that would allow me to cut/paste. I came across EditorMonkey and that worked but support for that has been dropped. While it would have been a temporary fix I decided to keep looking.

The next one I found was WYSI-Wordpress. I was able to do the cut/paste and touch up the articles.

So I used it because I found it quickly and it works. I also liked the way it handles pictures. To add a picture to the post simply upload it (through WordPress “Write” page) and then it can be previewed and picked from a list and either the thumbnail or full picture can be used. The potential downside I see here is that the preview list could grow large over time.

Here’s some pluses and minuses. Keep in mind I’m just getting into this so there may be solutions to the minuses.

Limited formating capability without going into the HTML code. No pre-defined header styles.

The Firefox built-in spell checker works.

Built in dictionary is funky (at least in Firefox 2). There’s a button that allows word lookups it freedictionary.com. This worked at first but now when a word is search for it opens in a new tab within the pop-up. The new tab is not sized for the pop-up (which is size-locked). It”s extremely difficult to scroll around the window.

Excellent picture management. Allows uploading and inserting into the document. It creates thumbnails and allows them to be used.

A couple days ago I started looking at Dean’s FCKEditor For WordPressand at this time it’s what I’m using The WYSI-Wordpress plug-in is still installed, just not activated. Using it is just a couple clicks away and I may yet switch to it.